"Who in the world am I?" The universal question Alice asks during her journey through Wonderland is among the many disturbing and memorable lines from a book that remains one of the most quoted in the English language, after the Bible and Shakespeare.

The haunting combination of Lewis Carroll and his Wonderland, an enigmatic writer and a mesmerising nonsense story, is one of the strangest in our literature. Originally created for a Victorian English family, the Caterpillar, the Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat, White Rabbit, Mad Hatter and the rest have joined the everyday cast of the world's fantasies.

Translated by Nabokov into Russian, adapted by the Surrealists, championed by TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and WH Auden, and now filmed, for the umpteenth time, by Tim Burton in a calculated, charmless mash-up of Carrollian themes, the Alice books continue to exert an indestructible spell: teasing, phantasmagorical, narcotic, existential and profoundly English. Nothing you put on the 3D screen can equal Carroll's imagination.

Alice is a child but her story is hardly for children. She's a disagreeable little girl who meets a cast of irritable grotesques and engages in that savage and frivolous academic banter so typical of Oxbridge. She may not be a likeable protagonist but she is driven by a quest that resonates universally. "Who in the world am I?" propels the reader through the madness and casual violence of Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

The mystery of the artist as a shy, stuttering don, who saw himself as the Dodo, is also integral to the unique appeal of these stories. Next to the conundrum of Alice, there's the enigma of Charles Dodgson. A new biography, The Mystery of Lewis Carrollby Jenny Woolf (Haus) covers fresh ground but is inevitably defeated by its subject.

Actually, the facts are simple. Dodgson was the eldest son of a domineering, impecunious Cheshire vicar. He exchanged the claustrophobia of his father's parsonage for the sophisticated repressions of Christ Church, Oxford, took holy orders there, and made the college his home until his death. He was, however, more than an ineffectual scholar.

A clue to the shadow side of Victorian England, a far stranger place than its public face suggests, the Rev Dodgson nurtured unfulfilled obsessions for prepubescent girls, often photographing them in the nude, apparently with parental approval. This double life provided escape for a reclusive Oxford bohemian who knew Tennyson, Millais, Swinburne, the Rossettis, Ellen Terry and Julia Margaret Cameron. By 1876, when he published The Hunting of the Snark, the career of Lewis Carroll was more or less over. Like Alice, Dodgson never resolved the question of who he really was. He died aged 65 in 1898.

I think the appeal of Wonderland is threefold. First, it is the haunting meditation of a lonely, brilliant artist, grappling with the puzzles of existence, the nature of being, and the relations of words and meaning. Second, it is an exhilarating academic joke: the collision of Oxford logic with the Anglo-Saxon nonsense tradition.

More than either of these, it is a poignant love story: the repressed yearning of a solitary man for a resolution to his inner frustrations. Was he in love with Alice's 10-year-old brother or, with Alice Liddell herself? No one will ever know the truth of that mystery – pages were torn from diaries, family doors slammed on over-intrusive inquiries. Perhaps it is in the melancholy, unresolved, and unknowable, reality behind these stories that their enduring power resides.